U.S. Expanding Bases To Contain China

Thailand is soon likely to be on the list of the Asia-Pacific countries where US troops will be based on a permanent basis.

Right now, the Pentagon is mulling its return to the U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy Airfield which was a military base for the USAF B-52 bombers during the Vietnam War in the early 1970s to launch airstrikes on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Located 40 kilometers from the Thai resort of Pattaya, U-Tapao also serves as an international civil airport which mainly receives tourist charter flights from Russia, the CIS countries and those of Eastern and Western Europe. Speaking at a regional security conference in Singapore earlier this month, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that NASA was weighing the use of U-Tapao as its basic airfield which would help implement its regional meteorological program. Panetta also said that the US would shift 60 percent of its naval forces to Pacific ports, a move that commentators say is designed to contain China’s growing military clout.

It is clear that conducting atmospheric studies will hardly be the only goal of the US base in U-Tapao. Speaking on condition of anonymity earlier this month, a spokesman for the Royal Thai Armed Forces Headquarters said that Bangkok is concerned over China’s reaction to the possible use of U-Tapao airfield by the United States which Beijing fears may be used for collecting intelligence information.

These concerns seem well-grounded given that there is already a small-sized US company in U-Tapao which deals with refueling US planes and ships which transport US servicemen and military supplies to Afghanistan and Iraq. Speculation is also rife that U-Tapao’s US sector was used by stealth aircraft to transport foreign terrorism suspects to the United States and its Guantanamo base in Cuba.

Washington wants Bangkok to help it implement a program on aerial surveillance of the transportation of trade and military cargos en route from the Middle East to the Pacific Ocean. This is the main maritime transportation artery that China uses to develop its trade relations with many Asian and African countries, says Andrei Volodin of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy.

“The United States is dismayed about China’s ever-increasing geo-economic might which may well be transformed into military and political clout,” Volodin says. “This is why Washington is trying to resuscitate its Cold War-era dominance in the Pacific, something that is designed to contain China. By doing so, the United States hopes to implement its strategy on containing communism on the whole,” Volodin says.

In a bid to expand its Pacific clout, the United States is also considering its return to the Cam Ranh Air Base in Vietnam and the Subic Bay Air Base in the Philippines. Experts say that US troops returning there is just a matter of time. Washington’s policy on building up its military presence in Asia is already bringing its first results, something that analysts say is almost certain to prod China to respond in kind. Given many regional countries’ dependence on China, Beijing will try to prevent these countries from cooperating with Washington, pundits say, referring to China’s drive to uphold its strategic interests.

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So the memories of the US destruction of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, not to mention the Philippines, are not enough to stay the hands of the latest warmongers with a need to dominate the world and ensure peace cannot break out.

If there’s a document in the public domain which proves that it’s a good idea to divide one’s military forces into bite-size chunks and scatter them all over the world, amid hostile locals, I’d like to read it. The template for this scheme/plot looks a lot like a global version of the Vietnam model which was applied to AfPak, despite failing in Vietnam. It only survived a decade of exposure to the AfPak “theatre” because nobody supplied the enemy with weapons of sufficient range to compromise the security perimeter of the bases and bunkers. But, as a military triumph, AfPak was as big a failure as Vietnam but in a different way. In Vietnam the enemy inflicted significant casualties on US forces. But in AfPak, the base and bunker system of self-protection has led to US suicide casualties slightly outnumbering casualties inflicted by the enemy. Since the US appears to have no interest in discovering what has gone wrong with the base and bunker theory, transplanting it everywhere before solving its evident shortcomings seems like a triumph of enthusiasm over commonsense.
But then, so does inflating and nurturing delusions of world-domination.